Daily Archives: 14 December 2021

A Progressive-Democrat Threatens

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California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has issued a threat to try to destroy one of our most fundamental rights as Americans: our right to keep and bear Arms. He’s doing it, too, while drawing a disingenuous parallel between Arms possession and abortion—and in the process, threatening an even more fundamental right, one imbued in all humans not just in Americans.

If states can shield their laws from review by federal courts, then CA will use that authority to help protect lives.
We will work to create the ability for private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in CA[.]

In the process, Newsom ignored a critical distinction here. Gun rights are in our Constitution.

The right to abortion exists only in a Supreme Court ruling and has only the force of statutory law—which is explicitly subordinate to our Constitution.

Regarding Newsom’s disingenuous claim about using legal authority to protect people’s lives, he’s also ignoring that our gun rights exist in critical (but not exclusive) part to defend lives and to defend against overreaching government. That the tools occasionally are misused to illegally kill only emphasizes the need to better catch and punish the killers, not to punish the vast majority of us for the crimes of those few. And to not keep letting the accused killers back out on the street with little to no bail.

Abortion laws, on the other hand, kill babies and tend toward blocking legal voices from speaking for them in court. That’s not very protective of our very youngest people’s lives.

Invading Ukraine is a Trap for Putin?

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That’s the thesis Christopher Hartwell has in his Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed. And he made a good case: Russia failed in a similar situation in Afghanistan; the “brother Slav” argument that Putin makes for Ukrainians coming into the Russian fold isn’t all that; the Ukrainians would mount a strong guerrilla war after losing the invasion war, making the total cost too high for a fragile Russian economy to survive. He concludes with this:

Russia can’t be an empire without Ukraine. But Russia will cease to be a great power if it tries to acquire the rest of Ukraine.

Hartwell, however, ignored a couple of key points, along with made a false comparison.

The false comparison is that of Ukraine and Afghanistan. There was far more enmity, especially fueled by culture and fundamentalist religion, between Afghans and Russians than exists between Ukrainians and Russians, for all the current “brother Slav” split.

Afghan geography lent itself far more effectively to guerrilla resistance than does Ukrainian territory.

The matter of experience: the Red Army, now Russian Ground Forces, gained quite a lot of experience at fighting against a guerrilla foe in Afghanistan, and those forces now are real-time combat experienced at prosecuting a guerrilla war in Ukraine’s Donbas region, the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. They’re conversant with both sides of the guerrilla question. They’re also gaining currency as an occupation force in Crimea.

The key points are these: regardless of how easy or hard it might be for Putin to conquer Ukraine (which conquering will be the easier for Biden-Harris’ refusal to arm Ukraine even with defensive weapons, much less offensive ones), Putin in the end will have Ukraine under his at least more-or-less control, and in the process, he will have completely denied Ukraine to the rest of Europe.

The other key point will be his success at humiliating Biden-Harris, adding to the Biden-Harris administration’s own destructive effects on American credibility. That alone is worth a pretty kopek in Putin’s geopolitical calculation.

Maybe an invasion wouldn’t be such a trap.